Zhukov said:
(The dreaded wall-o-text lurks below. I tried to keep it as concise and readable as possible. No, really, I did.)
Let me make one thing clear right off the bat. I am not from the US. I'm Australian. Therefore, I have no personal stake in this. I am not really trying to make any particular argument, one way or another. My interest in this matter is mostly...well, I suppose the most appropriate term would be "anthropological".
Just try to bear that in mind when you respond. Please.
So... I'm guessing that everyone here has heard about the medical dramas involving the artist of the Escapist's own Extra Credits show [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111418-Extra-Credits-Artist-Amazed-at-Fan-Support]. Long story short, she sustained injury to her shoulders. Quite a lot of injury. If untreated, she could lose the use of her arms. (Just take a brief moment to dwell on the various delightful implications of not being able to use your own arms.) Now, in order to receive the required treatments, she had to come up with a large amount of money. Somewhere around $20,000 USD. No, that's not a typo. Yes, we're talking one thousand dollars, twenty times over. And just to make it all better, her private medical insurance refused to pay out. (What's that? An insurance company weaseling out of having to pony up the cash? Well, I never... who would have thought, eh?)
Luckily they managed to organize a lightning fundraiser that resulted in a ridiculous amount of money being generated in a ridiculously short time [http://rockethub.com/projects/2165-extra-credits]. It was all rather heartwarmingly awesome.
But hang on one second. Let me just back up a few sentences. A person was expected to produce $20,000 in order to receive medical treatment for an injury that would prevent her from earning a living and drastically reduce her quality of life.
America, just... what the fuck?
See, here in Australia, what with our evil communist government health system, we occasionally like to tell silly campfire horror stories about the state of health care in the US. Y'know, tales about that terrible place where you can get hit by a car and hospital staff will refuse to put you back together unless you throw wads of money or medical insurance forms at them. I never really knew what to think about these stories. And, quite frankly, I didn't particularly care because hey, why would I? That mess is an entire Pacific Ocean away. But this whole business with Extra Credits and the injury of the Pink Bean seems to suggest that those stories were disquieting close to the truth.
Some months back there was talk of the system being changed under the Obama administration. Last I heard it was still in the early stages, it seemed to mostly consist of a lot of people running around yelling something about socialism. Did that end up going anywhere?
So, anyway... is there a point to all this text? Well... no, not really. I guess I'm just a bit surprised that such a system would exist in a nation that likes to hold itself up as the epitome of the developed world, and not entirely without reason. Also, I would really like to hear from some of the many American escapists. What do you people think of this system? Do you want to defend it? Is there something I am missing here?
...
PS. If anyone is interested, I could give a brief summary of the far-from-perfect Australian system for purposes of comparison. I was going to do it here, but this is already too long.
PPS. Oh yeah, and another thing. I know it's a bit tricky given the nature of the topic, but can we please try to keep the USA-bashing within reasonable bounds? Yeah, I know they pull some immensely stupid shit on occasion, but, well... don't we all?
It's a little more complicated than a lot of people think.
For starters I will say that for all of it's problems, any first world nation complaining about it's health care becomes subjective very quickly. For 90% of the human population through the second and third world there isn't much of a health care system in place at all. The majority of humans actually living in places like Africa, Asia, and India. While some of those places do have huge, modern cities, countries like India and a lot of Asia are known for having situations where you might have a modern city in one place, and another area a hundred miles away that might as well be in the middle ages. This is one of the reasons why aid is such a big deal when disasters hit those places, they simply don't have the resources to deal with their problems for the population in general, never mind when something really bad happens. Even the worst of the first world countries is lightyears ahead of the second and third world.
That said, a point that a lot of people seem to miss when it comes to health care is that the world depends on the US and it's capitalist system of health care to support their own systems. Like it or not drug companies, and doctors are out there to make money. People develop these cures, surgical techniques, medical devices, and other things with the intention of being able to sell them. Most of the profit to be made from these developments comes from the USA because we're one of the increasingly few countries that allows the medical industry to operate in a "for profit" fashion.
What this means is that the abillity to make money off the American market (the biggest in the world) is what keeps things profitable for those developing the technology and techniques. Other nations with socialized systems are able to get away with what they do largely because the innovators have a major market (the biggest one) to recoup their expenses and make money off of.
If the US was to socialize medicine like some other countries have, the medical industry would be crushed, and that would mean far less innovation in general. Even developments outside of the US, come to the US in a way that makes money for the creators. Companies like Pfizers, Merck, and others aren't US companies but rely on the US to make their big profits. Socialized "the goverment pays what it things is fair" policies might be great for the people but hardly serve the interests of business, but like it or not without business and the billions of dollars spent in R&D, especially SAFE R&D (which makes things more expensive) we'd have fare inferior medical technology than we do now.
Politically speaking this isn't a popular talking point, but it figures into a lot of the thought processes on the whole medical situation. A lot of people in authority DO realize that the world's medical community right now is being propped up by the US, and that includes the US itself. We socialize health care in the US to the extent of other nations, it's going to backfire, and so so in such a way that it's going to lower the quality of health care over a period of time through the entire world.
It's not a situation where there would be some kind of immediate apocolypse if the US socialized health care, things don't work that way. It would be gradual, with less innovations being made, big drug and medical companies downsizing, and similar things. There are philanthropists out there, but your not going to have teams of billionaires throwing fortunes into developing things that they will never see a return on.
Overall, the entire situation is one where the US can't just socialize medicine here, despite the fact that it's strangling us as a society. The whole insurance system that helps balance out the lack of socialized medicine is causing a lot of problems itself, as you wind up having TWO layers of greedy bastards (the medical industry, and the insurance industry) double teaming your average citizen.
To solve the problem ultimatly requires efforts on an international level, which basically means that a lot of these socialized systems need to wind up paying more money into the whole international medical system one way or another. It's not what the goverments/people think is fair so much as the medical companies and innovators seeing a return on their investments. Basically the big socialist nations need to become more capitalist here, and the US needs to become more socialist... rather than the current situation where the US pretty much winds up providing all the major profits in medicine while others reap the benefits and pretty much go "Lawl, the US health care system sucks".
I know many people are going to disagree with what I'm saying, because heck it's not a popular point, but this is pretty much where we are now. A lot was said about it when Obama was trying to rehaul the system.
As far as what happened with Allison from Extra Credits, I've been worried about something like that happening to me (being disabled, and dependant on social security and medicaid from when I was working... with medicaid not exactly being the best method of coverage).
Oh and that's another point I will sort of make, in the US we *DO* have the medicare and medicaid system. For everything that I said above, it's important to note that the elderly and disabled *DO* get some coverage from the goverment. What's more most (but not all) hospitals in the US receive federal funding, which also means that they can't refuse to treat people based on their lack of abillity to pay. In most parts of the US, it's not likely that you are going to be left to die without treatment. Most of the horror stories about that have to deal with hospitals that DON'T receive public monies and are 100% privatly managed and funded. That can be a touchy subject at times, but they represent an exception rather than the rule. In a few areas like Florida, there have been cases where people who are injured have been unable to find a publically funded hospital before they succumbed to injuries, but it's also important to understand the situation that spawned that. In Florida all of the older folks down there create a situation where if they don't pay/have coverage there is almost no chance of the hospitals recouping the losses. The same can be said of the international tourists going to Disney World and such, those guys get injured and leave the area (or the country) and again, getting paid at all can be an issue. In those enviroments federal monies probably wouldn't be sufficient to keep them afloat, which is why they don't take it. Someone has to pay all those doctors, buy and maintain the equipment, etc...
Of course this is just a side point to the overall TL
R type rant I've just gone on.
